Recovery days

Last week I had two strong workouts on back to back days. That has been followed by four days of slow and very tiring runs. Sometimes our bodies just need to take it easy. As I get older I feel more and more in tune with my body. I can feel soreness and preinjury pain before I force an overuse injury on myself. I have learned to take it easy on my recovery days. After all as a long distance runner I am training for one massive performance. Several massive workouts do the bulk of specific preparation for any one event. Thus, training hard most days will only limit my training for the big workouts.

It can be hard to be patient as I try to squeeze more workouts into the ever shortening time to marathon day. I simply try to comfort myself with what I have already done and not worry about the final result. No one or two workouts is going to improve my marathon time by five or ten minutes now. As I always say:

1. Stay motivated
2. Stay healthy
3. Train hard

I'm good with one and two now and doing fairly well on three so it would be better if I did not get picky about the details and let recovery take it's natural course.